


Tethered

by LilydaleXF



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s06e19 The Unnatural, F/M, Fluff, MSR, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2016-11-23
Packaged: 2018-09-01 14:44:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8628451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilydaleXF/pseuds/LilydaleXF
Summary: What if "The Unnatural" was turned upside down? Scully invites Mulder to the office on a Saturday, they marginally work, and then the evening is a surprise for Mulder.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: References to lots of episodes through "The Unnatural." The biggest references are to "Dreamland I" and "The Jersey Devil," but no specific knowledge of these or any episode is needed to understand the story. The "all things" blanket has a cameo.
> 
> Thanks to Anjou for encouragement and sage advice.

The janitor's broom scraping on the floor outside the X-Files office might as well be scratching directly against Mulder's brain as much as it currently hurts. Although his brain hurting implies thinking, and cerebral activity has been sorely lacking the whole time Scully has had them at work on this beautiful Saturday.

When she called him that morning suggesting, if not requiring, that they meet in the office to catch up on filing papers, writing reports, and submitting receipts it had sounded like a prime opportunity to not be bored at home while waiting for Monday and Scully's company. Now, many forms and paper piles later, he is not so sure. It seems he only traded venues for boredom, albeit upgraded to a place with a cleaner floor and a better view.

He looks at Scully sitting on the other side of his desk in her serious black suit. Her definition of "weekend casual" would fail all her typical tests of rationality, the conundrum of which is part of why she engages him so. Her feet in heels are propped up on a white cardboard storage box intended to be neatly filled by the end of the day. Her knees are bent and are serving as a makeshift desk. She's been quietly engrossed in papers on her lap for quite some time.

Interrupting the silence he says, "Scully, I think if Skinner finds any more paperwork from us on his desk than what we've already prepared today, he's going to personally open an X-File about what's possessed this division."

"Naw, he'll know to blame me."

Mulder smirks while thinking that at least Scully's weekend vocabulary occasionally veers from her normal formal course.

"Not blame me," she corrects. "Thank me."

"So you'd be the otherworldly demon in this possession scenario. Intriguing."

"There is no scenario. Stop being distracting and get back to your pile."

"It's a pile of something all right," he mutters.

"What's that, Mulder?"

By her tone of non-judgment, he doesn't think she heard what he said. It's historically been much easier to address Scully's questions and appease her exasperation when he hears her voice only in his head before he any of runs off somewhere unannounced, meets a seedy informant, jumps on a moving train, hangs off a cable car, drills a hole in his head, chases a 1939 ghost ship. When he hears her voice right in front of him, such decisions become much more difficult.

She shot him once when he was making a bad decision. Decisions in her presence became a bit more metered after that. Not as metered as she would surely like, and not even as much as he would like. He understands with more unwavering realization every day what she deserves and how unacceptably below that bar he feels himself to be, but damn. Sometimes trains just have to be jumped upon.

Not now, however. Her gun is in her reach, and she already has a clue how he's feeling about today's tasks.

He sighs. "This paperwork is making my head hurt, Scully."

"You may be becoming hypoglycemic. We should've taken a break for lunch a while ago. Did you even eat breakfast?"

An escape hole has opened! "What would I do without you, doc?" he says as he pushes himself up out of his chair. "I'll go grab us some lunch. I won't forget something sweet."

She tips her head up and shoots him a brief but warm, deep smile. He does the same, for some decisions make themselves.

Later, as he walks back into the office, bags in hand, with his feet clomping loudly in their isolated underground lair, nothing seems to have changed. Scully is still in the same chair, sitting the same way, and no new papers look to have been sorted or filed.

Without turning back toward the door to see him, she says, "Hi, Mulder."

He's about to return the greeting but his mouth stops forming words and instead hangs open as he gets closer to her and catches a glimpse of the papers on her lap.

"Scully! You cheat!" he exclaims in surprised awe, tinged with jealousy and annoyance. "You've been sitting there all this time looking at cars?"

"Not all this time."

"How much time are we talking about here, exactly?"

"Did you bring back a brownie?" she wonders.

"What? No. And don't change the subject," he admonishes as he sets down the bags holding their brownie-free but cookie-accented lunch. He leans back against the desk, facing her with a raised brow.

She flips a brochure to face him. "Look at this, Mulder. There are so many cars besides little sedans."

"Uh-huh," he agrees in a sing-song, where-are-you-going-with-this, please-continue tone.

"But we are never in any of them." She waves the brochure a bit at him as she says, "Lariat gives us these packets every time, over and over and over, showing their fleet. We've rented so many cars that we've qualified for all sorts of upgrades, but do we ever use them? No. We get those little sedans."

"That's the practical FBI way, Scully."

"Oh, the one time we follow practical FBI rules!"

He shrugs in reply. She has a point there.

"We've gotten so many of these Lariat brochures, Mulder, that they've gone through three iterations since we started this latest huge pile of case receipts. Three! And they started giving us leasing information, which means even more brochures and an even wider array of cars. Leases, Mulder! We drive so many of Lariat's cars that they're now trying to sell us one."

"We'd probably get two, not one."

"And they'd probably both be dumb little sedans. With those stupid little cup holders that don't even hold large drinks."

There's her weekend vocabulary again. He grins. The humor in her strange sudden car fascination is greater than the unfairness of him most likely having gotten more work done today than she has.

She suddenly gasps and bolts out of the chair, causing slick brochures to slide dramatically from her lap and along the floor, except for one paper still clamped in her hand. "I gotta go."

"Now, Scully? We're not done. And there's lunch."

"I'll call you later," she says as she pulls her nice new suede coat from the back of her vacated chair and starts trotting toward the office door.

"Wait, Scully…." He doesn't finish his confused questioning before she's disappeared out the door and down the hall. He glances back at the bags on his desk and says out loud as if she could still hear him, "I am not eating that salad, but I am going to eat your cookie."

One sandwich, two cookies, and a respectable number of processed files after Scully darted away, Mulder followed her lead, though with markedly fewer papers spilled on the floor in the process. Now, hours after last seeing her, he is sitting outside on the stoop of his apartment building. He's here because Scully had phoned him as promised.

"Where are you?" she asked him in lieu of a greeting.

"Home," he replied honestly despite his concern that she was calling annoyed from the office where she expected him to still be.

"Good. Be outside in ten minutes. Bring a blanket."

After receiving an instinctual instant confirmation from him that he would meet her, she hung up with no further explanation. This Saturday has been unusual. And that's saying something for someone who last week was investigating a guy who seemingly wrote stolen hearts into reality.

A sleek black sports car pulls up and stops in front of his building. As the car approaches, its smooth roll into and out of the shadows cast by streetlights reminds him of oozing black oil. Captivating, beautiful, dangerous. Resistance is futile.

The passenger window slides silently down, and he sees Scully leaning over toward it just as he hears her speak.

"Get over here, Mulder," she calls out in a honeyed voice with a flick of her head beckoning him near. She's not smiling, exactly, but it's there, under the shadows and being mischievous.

He curls his body down into the car, tossing a blanket into the back where it knocks against a paper bag.

"A Porsche, Scully?"

"Last day of the deal."

"Is it yours?"

"Tonight it is."

She drives this evening on the edge of recklessness, but only on the edge, the safe edge, the preferred Scully side of reckless. The engine whirs for permission to really fly, but she keeps it just on the grounded side of V1 speed. She knows what she's doing, her hands light on the wheel. Her eyes are wide and alert as they watch the road and when they periodically peek at him, he notices, when she thinks he isn't paying attention.

They ride for a while with only the hum of the car as sound. He tries to turn on the radio at one point, but she denies him. He doesn't mind the quiet – that's how they usually ride. He is mostly curious about what she might have tuned into tonight before he was in the car. She always has something on when he is not in the car.

More time passes in companionable silence. He breaks it eventually with a question.

"Where are we going, Scully?"

"You don't want to just drive, Mulder?"

"Your driving skills are outstanding, I'm probably going to try to pull this seat warmer out and take it home, and I have never felt more kinship with the road than in this badass car, which probably has a sound system to match if somebody would let me find out, but no."

"No?"

"No." He pauses, ponders, glances, and makes a decision. "It's your own fault, you know."

"Me?" she chuckles in a way that lights her entire face and settles in sparks in her eyes. "Because I rented this car that you apparently want to take to a chop shop for parts?"

"You," he warmly reaffirms. "You're the one who talked about getting out of the damn car and living life. I may have actually heard you."

"Maybe not out of this particular car," she jests. "And anyway, what about _what happens in Dreamland, stays in Dreamland_? I thought that was some kind of Area 51 rule."

"You giving any consideration to rules involving Area 51 is fantastic and intriguing, Scully, and we will discuss that at length sometime in the near future." She groans and rolls her eyes at him in exasperation the same way she does when he starts a slide show and she feigns scorn and doubt as she settles down and leans in to soon jockey him with thoughtful questions.

"But yeah," he says, "I was thinking that we would sometime tonight get out of the damn car."

"And live life."

"Or something like it."

In reply she flicks her head toward the window and asks him, "Do you know where we are?"

He looks outside, really looks, and sees trees and lights and businesses he has never visited. Trusting her unconsciously and distracted by the mere fact of being in this nighttime social situation with Scully, he hadn't been paying attention to the particular roads she'd taken them down. 

"I have no idea where we are," he admits.

"I do. We're almost there."

A good number of quiet minutes later they are standing outside the car in a park. It's dark, but there are tall, bright lights scattered throughout the grounds. They're somewhere suburban, somewhere a park with a large playground like this not only exists but remains safely lit at night.

"How do you even know about this place, Scully?

"I used to come here with my godson."

"You have a godson?" His brows move together like he's trying to squeeze the memory of a godson from his brain.

"Trent. He's twelve. Or thirteen?"

"So not a nephew. Does he live near here?"

"He's the son of an old friend. We don't talk as much as we used to, I guess." Her brows move together like she's trying to discern whether she's lost touch with her old world or if a part of it is still stealthily tucked inside her microchipped head.

Mulder doesn't know what to say. He glances down and kicks a little heap of leaves, which limply move in response. It rained last night, and the piled leaves are still damp and sticky. Nothing is ever easy to move and uncover, he thinks. His brows are still furrowed.

"Come on, Mulder," she says as her fingers brush against his jacket and she starts to walk.

Scully leads them to a corner of the playground, an area that's paved over and spiked with a few poles.

"Tetherball, Scully? You want to play tetherball?"

"Yes. Now be quiet and play."

"I don't think this is quite fair," he says as he rises up on his toes and peers down at her more than he already can without accentuating their height difference.

"Shush, Mulder."

She knocks the ball over to his side, and he punches it back easily. That lasts for a few back-and-forths when all of a sudden the ball flies up in a quick arc above his head. He can't very well reach it.

"Scully!"

"Physics, Mulder." One more whop of the ball. "Like a planetary orbital path. Kepler's laws." Whop! "Geodesics. Newtonian inertia."

"Scully!" he calls out again in faux anger and entirely real awe and amusement, not even trying to hit the ball anymore. He's watching her spout science, move with grace, and kick his ass at tetherball, and it is his best moment in recent memory.

Another whop.

"You played with your godson like this?"

She nods. "He didn't like playing with me very much." She smacks the ball one more time, which wraps the tether all the way around the pole and bangs the ball against it with a metallic thud. She tilts her chin up and grins at him in undeniable triumph that spreads across her entire face and everywhere else he dare observe.

He grins back, not because he lost the game but because he won that look on her face.

"I played more with Trent's dad." She smirks. "He actually didn't like playing with me very much either."

_I like playing with you_ , he wants to say but doesn't.

"Did you talk to him about geodesics?" he says instead as he flicks at the ball, starting a slow unwrap of the tether.

"No."

"Then there's the problem, Scully. Guys love engaging in sports when they're explained using geometry and related complex principles of relativity."

"Mulder," she laughs out at him in two distinct syllables.

"C'mon," he purrs as he lightly swings the ball over to her. "Wanna tell me about epicyclical motion?"

She catches the ball, tucks it under her arm. "It's elliptical orbiting at angles like that, not circular. But you know that already. Epicyclical. Honestly, Mulder."

This time he laughs. Her eyes glow with mirth. Like a moth to a flame, he's drawn and alit.

She casually pushes the ball over to him, the tether waving loose and wild. "You have officially lost the X-Files tetherball tournament, Mulder. In perpetuity."

He dodges the ball's erratic movement and follows Scully over to where they left the blanket and paper bag.

She unfurls the blanket on the grass in one quick whip no doubt learned from handling countless surgical drapes. They sit, the heavy weight and tight weave of the blanket keeping any lingering dampness from the rain away.

She opens the bag and pulls out a brown block wrapped in layers of clear film. It's huge - as big as her hand.

"Mmmm, chocolate," he announces with a grin. She made sure today had a brownie in it after all.

"It's not chocolate," she proudly corrects. "It's a nonfat carob oat wish bar."

"Ugh!" he moans as his grin fades and he sticks out his tongue in the universal symbol of "ick!" "I bet the air in my mouth tastes better than that."

"Don't knock it till you've tried it."

"Done. No knocking. Last time I tried to knock something, you turned physics against me."

"Physics is for everyone, Mulder."

"Tell that to the kid crying because his godmother whacked the ball above his head every time and made him feel like a loser."

She drops the still-wrapped non-brownie into her lap and looks up at him. "I didn't mean to make you feel like a loser, Mulder. I beat you, but--"

"You didn't, Scully," he interrupts. "You made me feel like a science neophyte. Like usual." She quirks her head and smirks in undeniable admission.

He continues, "And you made me feel like a novice." He taps her bent knee with a single finger as he says, "I had no idea you were a tetherball ace."

Her smirk remains in confirmation, but she offers no follow-up. Her hands are fussing with the food's wrapper but leaves it sealed. He can tell that there's still something inside the bag, but he's afraid to ask about the cousin of the wish bar.

He resettles himself to lean back on his elbows and look up at the sky. He can see more stars from here than he can from home. She does the same, setting that awful brick of alleged food by the bag. They recline for a moment in silence. He doesn't quite understand why she brought them here, why she planned to sit on a blanket with him in the isolated night, but he doesn't ask since it occurs to him that maybe there doesn't need to be a reason. As he feels her nearby warmth, he's waiting for her to say something.

He doesn’t notice her finger slowly tracing along one of the blanket's thick black zigzag lines until she reaches him, raises her hand, and softly pokes his hip. He turns to catch her eye, but her face is already turning to the sky.

"What do you really think is up there, Mulder?"

"You mean besides aliens?"

"Including aliens."

"Scully! You think the stars and the sky include aliens?"

She gently thwaps his arm. The back of her hand rests there for a moment as her fingers slide down toward his hand. He's not sure if that's because she's warming up for another whack or because her hand feels as suddenly cold and lonely as his. Her hand is making its way back to rest on the blanket by her side before he finds out.

"I don't know, Scully. Sometimes I think they have to be out there. Other times I'm awfully aware that some people on this planet are capable of making deep falsehoods seem remarkably true."

She smiles wanly.

After a few quiet moments, he sees from the corner of his eye her finger running along the blanket's straight red line until she runs into his wrist. She taps him once, twice, then leaves the back of her fingers against him. He looks at her, but her eyes have again turned upward.

"I don't know either, Mulder. But," she more softly speaks, "I believe in you, I trust you, your truth. You know that, right?" she asks with audible doubt that strikes him with a mixture of shock and heartbreak. She is avoiding looking at him so fiercely.

"I know," he simply, sincerely states. He readjusts his hand so his fingers connect with hers. He is avoiding looking at her now too, but he feels her fingers purposely settle against his. By now they're lying down more than sitting.

She will never ask him if the same truth and trust holds for him, he thinks. He has to tell her. He needs to try to reach for that bar and help quell her uncertainty in the tie between them, her apparent worry that he doesn't feel it too. He looks down at their connected hands, rubs his fingers against hers.

"Nobody and nothing is more true to me than you, Scully."

She doesn't reply in words, but her fingers move against his in possessive grasp. The weight of that is heavy, and he feels it through his whole body. Knowing he is in danger of falling heavy against her in a literal sense, he feels he has to make light and not crush her with the burden of him any more than he already has in a figurative sense. It doesn’t matter anyway. Gravity will win in time. He knows this even without any physics confirmation from the scientist glowing in moonlight beside him.

"Although, Scully, I admit that I have serious doubt about your understanding of brownies. I don't even think that thing is food."

"I wouldn't lie to you about hallowed snacks, Mulder."

"You're not a liar in general, Scully."

She pauses, then emotionlessly blurts, "I told the car rental guy I was getting the Porsche as a surprise for my husband."

"Oh, well, then, that's, uh, a lie," he stumbles.

"He didn't know that, though. He made the assumption aloud; I did not correct him."

If Mulder didn't know what to say before, he really doesn't know what to say now. So he says the simplest thing that occurs to him.

"Why did you get that car, Scully?"

"I told you, last day of the deal."

"But we were working, planning to all day," he challenges. "And you already have a car."

She sighs. "I know, Mulder. It was impulsive. I just--. It seemed like the thing to do."

For something that she wanted to do, she sure doesn't look very happy about it. Her face is frozen in something disconcerting, maybe worry or fear.

He squeezes her hand. "I didn't say I didn't like it, haven't liked this evening. I just wondered. You are not traditionally known for impulsive decisions."

"I know, Mulder," she says again. "It just seemed like--"

"--the thing to do," he finishes.

"Yeah," she confirms.

Neither of them speak for a few moments. Then she scoots over toward him on the blanket. She settles her body so close to his but not quite touching along their lengths, except for their still-linked hands and for her head, which she rests on his shoulder. Some wisps of her hair tickle his chin.

"I don't think this is probably the best way to maximize use of that car tonight, Scully. I mean, just look at--"

"Shut up, Mulder, I'm being impulsive."

_Me too_ , he thinks, as he turns his mouth toward her and softly kisses the crown of her head before turning back to look at the sky.

They lie stretched out together, living life on this planet as the stars shine down on them with promise.


End file.
